Coronavirus : Country readiness

[Skazz]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

In a sign of how yuppie Toronto is, there was a fist fight in a bakery over bagels.  Of all things for people to lose their civility over in a crisis.

So, did you win?

Edited March 15, 2020 by Skazz

[Gromnir]

St. Patrick’s Day partiers hit the town over officials’ pleas amid coronavirus outbreak

*sigh*

is hard to be angry with the guy who earns a living via a day gig when he decides to violate certain reasonable cdc guidelines in order to keep working, but this is not same. is not a story 'bout a guy desperate to support self and kids 'cause he gots no savings and is literal a couple days o' day-work away from being homeless.

...

the real reason bernie sanders' campaign were doomed is 'cause the young people he were counting on to get him the nomination are broken. they won't vote, but the saturday 'fore st. patrick's day they will go out to packed bars in chicago and pittsburgh and southie where they use hand sanitizer to clean their conscience as well as their hands. 

terrible reality is most o' the boneheads in packed bars tonight won't get serious sick 'cause the under 40 crowd is less vulnerable to covid-19 serious symptoms and are unlikely to die or need hospitalization. sure, the younger folks still become infected, but they do not suffer as does the elderly or those with underlying med conditions.  somebody else's grandparent, two degrees o' separation removed from these party clowns, is gonna die and the revelers will never even know they were the cause.

meanwhile, spain locks it down and people in italy, where they is subject to wartime triage practices 'cause hospitals cannot handle the numbers o' sick, are continuing to die in increasing numbers.

and folks on this side o' the pond shrug and wonder what is all the excitement 'bout while they blame media or a political party for yet another hoax which is invisible but lethal?

Edited March 15, 2020 by Gromnir

[Skarpen]

UK finds an interesting approach. And by interesting I mean horrible

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/coronavirus-herd-population-government-21686216.amp

[Lexx]

Wanted to buy food yesterday... impossible. Almost all shelves are empty. Had to buy some frozen pizza and instant noodles, because that still had some leftover...

[Malcador]

12 hours ago, Skazz said:

So, did you win?

Knocked 'em out the lox.

[Raithe]

[Malcador]

3 minutes ago, Raithe said:

Hah.

[Azdeus]

NSFW and all that

 

[Mamoulian War]

Slovakia on complete lockdown for 14 days. Only groceries, pharmacists, banks, posts, gas station can serve their customers. Restaurants can only serve meals to customers one by one if they do not allow their customers inside the shop.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Mamoulian War

[Raithe]

[Raithe]

Although as posted from one of my friends..

 

I posted this in reply to someone and several people have said they found it helpful. Feel free to share:

The problem is it's viral pneumonia that spreads like the flu except four times as fast, is contagious before you ever have symptoms, which nobody has any immunity to, and which has a 15%-20% hospitalization rate. The death rate is about four times higher than flu which is also scary, but with the hospitalization rate (people needing oxygen treatments to no...t die) and the infection rate combined, it's enough to overwhelm the hospital capacity of every country. We have enough beds for peak flu season numbers, not for as many people will need them *at once* if this continues so spread without us slowing it down and flattening the curve. And the more past our medical system's capacity we get, the higher the mortality rate for the disease will be because people who *would* recover with oxygen treatments won't have access.

[Mamoulian War]

 

[pmp10]

13 hours ago, Skarpen said:

UK finds an interesting approach. And by interesting I mean horrible

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/coronavirus-herd-population-government-21686216.amp

We will only know if it's horrible when the whole thing is over.
For all we know the virus may be uncontainable and we are falling into useless panic. 

[213374U]

FWIW, it's misleading that it has a 15-20% hospitalization rate. That's for confirmed cases, which by definition are only a fraction of total infected. It's the same with the death rate -- CFR as opposed to IFR which is unknown (estimates from mathematical modeling I've read go from .5 to .9%) because some of the infected will be asymptomatic, and others will not present symptoms severe enough to warrant even a check-up. For comparison, SARS had little to no subclinical manifestations which means that clinical cases ~ total infected, while other CoVs are asymptomatic in up to 35% of cases per serological analysis.

Discount Trump is taking one hell of a gamble, but he may have the last laugh yet.

[majestic]

35 minutes ago, 213374U said:

Discount Trump is taking one hell of a gamble, but he may have the last laugh yet.

If not he'll effectively be killing his voter base. In an, uhm, quite literal sense. My fingers itch because I want to post something very cynical, but, eh. There's a time and a place for that and it's not now.

[Elerond]

32 minutes ago, pmp10 said:

We will only know if it's horrible when the whole thing is over.
For all we know the virus may be uncontainable and we are falling into useless panic. 

Gaining herd immunity against Covid-19 through infecting people with it seems to effort that is doomed from start as there are multiple strains of it and person who has one strain can be infected by another, so in order to gain immunity against covid-19 trough infection person needs to be 2-4 times and even that does not necessary is enough as it seems that covid -19 can mutate quite easily.  I would say that our only hope to get herd immunity is to develop vaccine which contains weakened versions of all the known strains.

[Guard Dog]

[213374U]

57 minutes ago, Elerond said:

Gaining herd immunity against Covid-19 through infecting people with it seems to effort that is doomed from start as there are multiple strains of it and person who has one strain can be infected by another, so in order to gain immunity against covid-19 trough infection person needs to be 2-4 times and even that does not necessary is enough as it seems that covid -19 can mutate quite easily.  I would say that our only hope to get herd immunity is to develop vaccine which contains weakened versions of all the known strains.

Do you have a source on this? Because I've read that there are two types (S and L) of the SARS-CoV-2 rather than "multiple", and I have seen no reports that patients can be infected independently by each type -- which is to be expected seeing as how it's a new development. Likewise, I have not seen any rigorous reports that people can indeed be infected again after recovering, but a study in macaques seems to indicate the opposite. In fact, a potential vaccine strategy seems to be aiming at common features shared by SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 that are likely to trigger an immune response, resulting in a vaccine that is effective against both -- I doubt different different strains of the current virus would be more different from each other than from the SARS virus.

[Zoraptor]

I've definitely seen reports that you can be simultaneously infected by both strains. The 'reinfectivity' may well be like the 'reinfection' people got from Ebola when they recovered and then tested positive- there's a low grade reservoir in areas that are not well served by the immune system such as the fluid in the eye; but it's largely irrelevant as you aren't infectious to others unless you rupture your eyeball.

Nobody really knows what the best model for covid-19 is which is part of the problem. Will it be like SARS, or will it be like the 'cold' causing corona virus we already have? While only a minority of colds are caused by coronavirus people tend to get multiple colds per year, and immunity to the version caused by coronavirus isn't permanent. And, if we want to talk worse case, there's always the possibility of a Spanish Flu type event where mild infections prime people for a cytokine storm from a different strain later on.

I'm not usually one to agree with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel but the UK approach is justified if the decision has been made that spread is inevitable and will happen whatever precautions are taken.

[Guard Dog]

Preppers: "We told you so"! https://apnews.com/355c96b2eebe575e42a2bb4dcdd2d7fc

LOL, don't worry about me... I'll be fine. I can go without leaving my property for two months without running out of anything. 

[LadyCrimson]

Pandemics have been the fear forever, I don't think anywhere in the world generally speaking has been ready for it, if one really could be "ready" for such a thing and on the bright side one has to be grateful it's not one of the potentially way more deadly things.

In the meantime, I have 7 rolls of "mega-sized" toilet paper and a shower. And plenty of cloth and soap + bucket if it came to that. I'm set. 

[Guard Dog]

Some life hacks from your friends in west Tennessee!

[injurai]

I went to two stores today and couldn't find a single roll of cheap sandpaper quality TP nor paper towels...

I made the mistake of prepping two weeks before the masses, and also not over-killing on stock. Just like the earliest reports had suggested.

But then people got involved and ****ed everything up. You'd think while global karma was being enacted they would have a bit of humility about them...

Worst part is, now stores are rationing, meaning the people with no stock are being limited by their purchases.

Stores need to deny hoarders from the get-go. People need to learn how to amortized their actions to prevent systemic shock.

[injurai]

 

[E.RedMark]

Keep safe everyone!